Sharon Hess, Managing Editor

The thing about the competitive world of high-end FPGAs is that they get bigger (gate density-wise), faster, and more complex. Xilinx now has Virtex-6; Altera’s got Stratix IV GT. If you stick with these vendors’ own tools, you’re golden. But you might be missing some adv...

Ultra-wideband signal processing requires getting the real-world signals into and out of the front-end DSP processors with minimal latency and maximum signal integrity. The Triton V-5 from TEK Microsystems combines ultra-fast ADC and DAC channels with three Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs, while the...

Though Altera and Xilinx FPGAs are used in space-based applications such as satellites and spacecraft, Actel has the market cornered on Class-S style rad-hard FPGAs. Trouble is: they aren't cheap, and RTAX anti-fuse devices are one-time programmable, making them expensive to burn during p...

Sometimes less is more. Consider the PrPMC520 from AcQ. The single FPGA-based ProcessorPMC (PrPMC) mezzanine board brings simple elegance to rugged, conduction-cooled embedded military designs. Based on the Freescale MPC5200B CPU running at a relatively sedate 396 MHz, the PowerPC 603e-bas...

Any old microcontroller or FPGA can string together ALUs or multipliers and call itself an algorithm processor while crunching fixed point arithmetic. But real world signals are unpredictable and can create wildly varying extremes such that only wide dynamic range can process them. In this...

Voltage-controlled crystal oscillators (VCXO) are the preferred way to provide stable clock references in high-precision cellular base stations or frequency-sensitive A/D front end sensors. But VCXOs consume real estate, power, and cost…and they can be tricky to design with. National...

We’re having that nirvana-like dream where one imagines programming FPGAs in a high-level language such as C and not having to deal with any of that semiconductor stuff. A fantasy? Not according to Impulse Accelerated Technology, who assert that their software-to-FPGA tools now work...

We are thoroughly convinced that no matter how enamored the world is with FPGAs for signal processing, multi-core general purpose CPUs are going to soon be competing at the low end with FPGAs. The same thing happened between bit slice and general purpose DSPs, then between GP DSPs and FPGA...

Programmable logic is now de rigeur in defense systems – but density and extended temp range are absolute requirements in high-rel applications. QuickLogic offers the 1 million gate version of their PolarPro family, their low-power programmable logic technology in a Mil-spec temperat...

Need to equalize left and right channels? No problemo. There’s now a reference design to allow a single Quickfilter Technologies QF1D512 Simple and versatile FIR engine (SavFIRe) IC to be configured to provide multichannel filtering. This way, designers can implement audio equalizati...